The Australian movement set out to attract "fellow-travellers" and pacifists, and was relatively independent of the international organisation.
The movement instigated the events which led to the attempted exclusion of Egon Kisch from Australia in late 1934 and early 1935.
The organisation continued to criticise democratic governments, including that led by Joseph Lyons in Australia, for anti-free speech and anti-Communist policies, which some historians have argued weakened its otherwise prescient message about the escalating threat posed by fascism and Nazism.
[2] Indeed, the main debate between historians with an interest in the MAWF has been a preoccupation about the extent to which it was first and foremost a Communist front organisation.
[3][4][5][6] Australian members included Mary Wren whose communist sympathies ran in stark contrast to her father John Wren's conservative Catholicism, Hugo Throssell, and federal Labor politician Maurice Blackburn, who was expelled from the ALP in 1937 for his membership of the MAWF.